Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Of all the novel fragments and novellas of German Romanticism Heinrich von Ofterdingen is perhaps the one that exemplifies most consistently Schlegel's statement that a "theory of the novel would have to be itself a novel" (1958, 2: 337). In his notebooks Novalis lists the "unities" (Einheiten ) of the novel as "the struggle between poetry and non-poetry. Between the old and the new world. The story and history of the novel itself" (1960, 1: 340 and 3: 639, no. 510). In fact, this novel fragment is a configuration of various literary forms which narrate the story of their own historical and formal production. The conceptual tapestry of the novel, where various reflections on the nature of understanding, interpretation, and knowledge are interwoven, makes a ready categorization of the work untenable. Novalis's notes of February 11, 1800, indicate that Ofterdingen was conceived as a poetic response to Goethe's "unpoetic" Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship) (ibid., 3: 645–652). Novalis finds Meister "fundamentally a fatal and stupid book—so pretentious and ornamented (artificial)" (ibid., 3: 646, no. 536). Novalis's polemic against Goethe's work provides the former with the pretext to formulate his own theory of the novel. For Novalis the novelist's endeavor is a hermeneutical event co-sponsored by the philosophical act of reflection and the poetic principle of selection and combination: "The novelist attempts to create poetry by events and dialogues, by reflection and portrayal. . . . Everything depends on the manner and art of artistic

selection and combination" (ibid., 3: 649, no. 549). The various parts of this narrative combination are reflected, as sanctioned by fragment 116 of the Athenäum, in an endless series of tropological mirrors. These parts often "float" between the real and ideal, between "what is represented and what represents . . . on the wings of poetic reflection."

The notion of "qualitative potentiation" or the exponential increase in the power of the poetic integer is implemented through a frequent use of foreshadowing. In this way, dreams, songs, poems, memories, and actual happenings all recall, anticipate, and reflect on one another. This recurring shift between various representations of reality is already apparent in the first two sentences of the novel:

Heinrich's parents were already in bed and asleep; the clock on the wall was ticking monotonously; outside the rattling windows the wind was blowing. From time to time the glimmer of the moon lit up the room. The youth lay restless on his bed and thought about the stranger and his stories. (ibid., 1: 195)

From one sentence to the next there is a shift from an everyday scene to the remembrance of things past, a reference to a mysterious stranger. The next sentence introduces the recurrent metaphor of the blue flower:

I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write and think of nothing else. I have never felt like this before; it seems as if I just had a dream or as if I had been transported into another world in sleep. For in the world where I otherwise lived, who would ever bother about flowers? (ibid.)

Novalis invests the unknown with the known by assigning the stranger and the blue flower the definite article from the very beginning. The blue flower with its wide repertoire of significations is the informing allegory of the novel and points to changing concepts at different temporal levels. It is introduced as a sign of indescribable longing, then becomes a symbol of ideal love, harmony with nature, the key to the code of nature, and, in a manner of speaking, the fleur-de-lis of the future kingdom of poetry.

In spite of the many shifts between the real world of the narrative and the ideal world of poetic prophecies, memories, and dreams the first part of the story called "Die Erwartung" (Expectations) takes

place in a real time and place: medieval Germany. Furthermore, the historical character of Heinrich is loosely based on a medieval bard of that name. Heinrich's actual journey with his mother from Eisenach to his grandfather's home in Augsburg constitutes the plot in the first part of the book. During the course of what appears to be an educational pilgrimage, Heinrich meets an unusual cast of characters including a party of traveling merchants, a group of crusaders, a Saracen slave girl, an old miner, a hermit in an underground library, and the poet Klingsohr and his daughter Mathilde. Heinrich's encounters and conversations with people from exotic worlds mark the stations of his Bildung . One of his early encounters is particularly revealing in its Romantic representation of the Orient. In his notes Novalis sketches the Saracen girl, Zulima, as an allegory of poetry: "The Oriental woman [die Morgenländerin ] is also poetry" (ibid., 1: 342). Heinrich is deeply moved by Zulima's song which tells of the woes of a stranger in a strange land. She tells Heinrich the story of her brother who moved to Persia to apprentice with a famous poet and was never heard of again, of the mysterious language of nature in her land, and of the poetic sentiments of her people:

She lingered particularly on the praise of her country and her people. She described their magnanimity and their pure, great sensitiveness to the poetry of life and to the wonderful, mysterious charm of nature. She described the romantic beauties of the fruitful Arabian regions, which lie like happy isles amid the pathless deserts, like refuges for the oppressed and the tired, like colonies of paradise. (ibid., 1: 236)

In Zulima's account Arabia is a museum of natural history where "strange, bright and many-colored figures and scenes on the old stone slabs" have preserved the myriad signifying practices of the past and intimate the presence of no longer presentable time and meaning: "An obscure recollection amid the transparent present reflects the images of the world in sharp outlines, and thus one enjoys a double world which in that way is freed of all that is crude and violent and becomes the magical poetry and fable of our senses" (ibid., 1: 237). In parting, Heinrich asks Zulima for her headband adorned with unknown letters. This gesture is yet another testimony to Heinrich's ongoing fascination with the esoteric signs of nature and occulted history.

The tales and fables within the novel constitute, in Schlegel's

definition of Romantic poetry, the endless series of mirrors that reflect the thematic concerns of the narrative. The Atlantis tale told by the traveling merchants in the third chapter of the first book introduces a compact itinerary of this novel. The song of the youth in the Atlantis tale deals with

the origin of the earth, the appearance of heavenly bodies, plants, animals, and human beings; with the omnipotent sympathy of nature; with the primeval golden age and its sovereigns—love and poetry; with the emergence of hate and barbarism and their battles with those beneficient goddesses; and finally with the future triumph of the latter, the end of misery, the rejuvenation of nature, and the return of an eternal golden age. (ibid., 1: 225)

The theme of the song becomes part of a progression in a symbolic series. It reappears as a more elaborate narrative in Klingsohr's tale and is then summed up in the Astralis poem which introduces the second part of the novel where it shifts from a second-order—as a story within a story—to a first-order narrative. In other words, the allegorical tales that were deviations from the plot of the first book become the thematic concern of the second book. Novalis orders experience in what he calls the "geometric progression" of the novel (ibid., 2: 534, no. 34). The idea of the novel cannot be contained in a center. Unlike Kant, who discounts the possibility of a conceptual rule adequate to the "free play of cognitive powers," Novalis finds a mathematical series that coincides with open-ended signification:

The novel is not the image or reality of a sentence . It is an intuitive implementation—realization of an idea. . . . An idea is an infinite series of sentences—an irrational quantity —that cannot be posited (musically)—incommensurable. . . . The law of its progression, however, can be formulated—and it is by this that a novel should be evaluated. (ibid., 2: 570, no. 212)

In spite of his wizardry with mathematical allegorizations, Novalis does not consider conceptual knowledge as an end in itself but as a means of achieving a state of informed innocence: "Knowledge [die Erkenntnis ] is a means of arriving at Non-knowledge [Nichterkenntnis ]. . . . Distant philosophy sounds like poetry—for each call into the distance becomes vocalic. . . . Everything becomes poetry—poem from afar" (ibid., 3: 302, no. 342). The Romantic

ideal of arriving at this state-of conscious naïveté through Bildung is realized in Heinrich's utopic experience of homecoming in the second part of the book. Here Heinrich returns to a dimension of theoretical innocence and poetic re-cognition. Understanding is not always categorical, nor is it governed by a priori forms of intuition. It can happen in the irrational world of a lost time, in hallucinations and dreams. The unconscious assumes the force of statement just as much as the conscious. A striking example is Heinrich's dream of Mathilde's drowning in the sixth chapter of the first book. On the one hand, its status in the story is one of a mere dream, for the real Mathilde makes several appearances in person after this dream. On the other hand, the only reference to Mathilde's actual death is in the dream, and, therefore, its symbolic representation and its reality become the one and the same. The force of the symbolic spares both Mathilde and the narrator the experience of the actual drowning or its replay at another narrative level.

Like dreams, memories are symbolic representations of knowledge. This is illustrated in a long conversation on history in the fifth chapter of the first book. Here Heinrich and a group of his traveling companions descend into mines in the company of a miner who has acquired a vast knowledge of the past by decoding the language of fossils. He was able to reconstruct a fragmented and forgotten past by studying the material remnants and ruins of the earth. The underground journey leads to the innermost cave where Heinrich and his companions meet Count von Hohenzollern, a hermit living in a vast library. He greets the travelers warmly and tells them the story of his youthful days as a soldier, of his children who were born in the Orient and died shortly after their arrival in Europe, and of his life with Marie, his wife who lies buried in the cave. During his conversation with Heinrich, Hohenzollern embarks on a lengthy argument for the literary structure of history. He emphasizes the importance of the associative power of imagination in imposing a coherent narrative form on the events of history. It is in Erinnerung (as memory and recollection) that the moments of Geschichte (as history and story) become an object of understanding and re-cognition:

The true sense for the stories [and histories] of human beings develops late and rather under the quiet influence of recollection than under the more aggressive impressions of the present. The immediate events seem

to be only vaguely related but they sympathize all the more beautifully with the more remote ones, and only when one is in a position to survey a long series [of events] and to avoid not only taking everything literally but also confusing the actual order [of events] with wanton dreams, does one apprehend the secret union of the past and the future and learn to piece together history out of hope and memories.

Only those to whom all past is present may succeed in discovering the simple rule of history. We come upon only incomplete and complicated formulas and can be glad if we find, even if only for ourselves, a useful prescription which provides us with an adequate explanation of our short lives. . . . Youth reads history only out of curiosity, like an entertaining fairy tale; for those in their more mature years history is a comforting and edifying friend who through her wise conversation prepares them gently for a higher, more comprehensive career and makes them familiar with the unknown world by means of telling images. (ibid., 1: 257–258)

History is then a representation of alterity, in this case, of another time which can never be recalled in its totality. This lost time is available to present consciousness only through fragments of texts or of collective memory which, in order to be understood, need narrative coherence. In Hohenzollern's view, therefore, only poets can write history, for they can re-collect fragments of time and rearrange them as a metaphorical whole in Darstellung :

When I seriously reflect on all this, it seems to me that a historian must necessarily be a poet, for only poets are likely to perfect the art of skillfully configuring events. In their stories and fables I have with quiet pleasure observed their fine sense for the mysterious spirit of life. There is more truth in their fairy tales than in scholarly chronicles. Even though the characters and their fates are invented, the spirit in which they are invented is nevertheless truthful and natural. To a certain extent, as far as our enjoyment and instruction are concerned, it does not matter whether the characters in whose fates we trace out our own ever really lived or not. We want to perceive the great simple soul in the events of an age; if this wish is granted, we do not bother about the accidental existence of its external figures. (ibid., 1: 259)

In this interpretation of Geschichte, based on its double meaning of history and story and governed by the poetic principle of narrative coherence, the paths of history and literature as well as historiography and literary criticism converge. Consequently, history is seen, as E. L. Doctorow once observed, as "a kind of fiction in

which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history . . . by which the available data for the composition is seen to be greater and more various in its sources than the historian presupposes" (1983, 25). In Novalis's "speculative history," the foregrounding of poetic operations helps identify, prior to analysis and explanation, certain levels of experience which may pose philosophical and cognitive challenges to understanding. The rhetorical use of language in the writing of history, the employment of tropes, can subject phenomena represented in historical texts to a poetic and ultimately a critical transformation.

An incident that follows the hermit Hohenzollern's discourse on history serves as a revealing reflection that the story makes on its own structural development. In Hohenzollern's library Heinrich finds a book "written in a foreign language which seemed to him to have some similarity to Latin and Italian" (1960, 1: 264). Gripped by a strange curiosity, Heinrich turns the pages of the book, which has no title, only to find his own image reproduced at various stages of his past and future life. He sees himself with his parents, present companions, and an imposing figure whom he does not yet recognize. The pictures on the last pages of the book get darker and blurred. When he comes to the last page Heinrich realizes that the book has no ending. He is overcome by a strong desire to read this occulted script: "He ardently wished he knew the language, for the book pleased him tremendously without his understanding a syllable of it" (ibid., 1: 264). Later Hohenzollern tells Heinrich that the book is written in Provençal and recounts the wondrous life of a poet. This book within the book prefigures the structural fortunes of the novel. Like the Provençal book, which has no title and no end, Heinrich von Ofterdingen remains a fragment. The actual book and the fictional book within the book, the "real" story and the prophetic story within the story are linked in their common structural destiny. Furthermore, this narrative strategy is a commentary on the intertextual nature of all books. Whether real or idea(l), books refer not to things in the world but to other books. Many postmodern novels such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose reflect on their own intertextual heritage. "I had thought, each book spoke of the things, human and divine, that lie outside of books," states Eco's narrator, "now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves" (1984, 342).

In the second part of the book, called "Die Erfüllung" ("The Fulfillment"), Heinrich moves from the real world of his family, his friends, his mentor Klingsohr, and beloved Mathilde to an ideal universe beyond time and space. He enters a domain of pure representation. Here the lines between different forms of narrative—story, poem, song, dream, prophecy—dissolve into a dreamlike vision. This vision is focused on reconstructing a world in a new language attuned to the pulse of nature. On this plane or planet suspended in a mythical time and space, Heinrich exists in a world of memory. He meets Sylvester, an old man intimate with the mysteries of nature. Heinrich's father had visited Sylvester's house in Rome as a young man. Sylvester is a figure from a past that would be inaccessible to Heinrich in a world of real or linear time. In the beginning of the novel Heinrich's father had recounted an earlier dream where Sylvester had appeared to him as a guide, leading him by the hand through long corridors into an open space where, like his son many years later, he is enchanted by the sight of the blue flower. A dream figure from the first part of the novel now reappears as a mediator and interpreter of fleeting and fragmentary signs of nature's languages. Sylvester instills in Heinrich an awareness of the universal signifying system that unites the disparate forms of human experience:

Plants are the most immediate language of the earth. . . . This green mysterious carpet of love . . . is renewed every spring, and its singular script is legible only to the beloved, like the Oriental bouquet. He will read forever and yet never be satisfied, and daily he will perceive new meanings, new, more enchanting revelations of loving nature. For me this infinite satisfaction is the secret charm which inheres in traversing the surface of the earth, for each region solves different riddles for me. (1960, 1: 329)

Just as the actual world of the first part often digressed into a world of poetic imagination, the poetic universe of the second part points to actual philosophical, moral, and social concerns. When Heinrich observes that Gewissen, the transcendental conscience that "generates the universe and meaning," appears to him "to be like the spirit of the world poem," Sylvester replies:

Conscience appears in every serious completion, in every cultivated truth. Every inclination and truth developed through reflection into a world picture becomes a phenomenon, a transformation of conscience.

All education [Bildung ] leads to what one can only call freedom, regardless of the fact that what is designated by this is not a mere concept but the creative ground of all being. This freedom is mastery. The master exercises unrestricted power in a purposeful, definite, and reflective manner. The objects of his art are his and subject to his will, and they do not chain or inhibit him. And precisely this all-encompassing freedom, mastery, or sovereignty is the essence, the drive of conscience. (ibid., 1: 331)

Like poetry, conscience cannot be reduced to conceptual categories yet it insures the freedom of human life. This union of moral and aesthetic education grants human beings mastery over the world by allowing them to read phenomena poetically or intuitively. Freedom resides in Bildung, which opposes the forces of ignorance and bigotry, and in the human capacity for visualization and symbol making through which we order and understand experience. As a representational system that subsumes sign and symbol, language insures this freedom. "Language," observes Heinrich, "is really a little world in signs and sounds. Just as human beings rule over it, so they would also like to rule over the great world and be able to express themselves freely in it" (ibid., 1: 287).

We also approach elusive time in language. We recover it in words, in a textualized archaeology, or we internalize it in dream and memory, which, like language, are signifying systems. The noumenal world and lost time are accessible, albeit indirectly, by representational remains. "In the age we live in there is no longer any direct intercourse with heaven," states Heinrich's father, "the old stories and records are now the only source of knowledge, in so far as we need it, of the divine world" (ibid., 1: 198). The important stations in Heinrich's journey are libraries. He sees images of the past, the present, and the future in the mysterious book in Hohenzollern's library. In this library time is experienced as a continuum. Indeed, in Foucault's definition the library is the site that collapses temporal difference by rendering all historical epochs co-present.^[4] Library circumscribes the field where the voyages in time, expeditions, and excavations unfold. The Romantic idea of the endless book is housed in the larger metaphor of the universal library. In "The Library of Babel" Borges employs a strikingly similar metaphor. Borges's library duplicates Hohenzollern's library by situating in its center an artifact that is an allegorical representation of the world of experience. In the latter this artifact was the Pro-

vençal book, which mirrored Heinrich's life in memory and anticipation. In the former it is a mirror. Talking about "the universe (which others call the Library)," the narrator notes that in its "hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite. . . . Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues" (Borges 1964, 51). Situated between Plato's cave and Borges's Babylon, Hohenzollern's library is a collection of the various representations of time.

The library is also a laboratory. In this case it is the site not only of an archaeological excavation of knowledge but also of a geological laboratory. Geology is a discipline of memory, for the study of nature is here represented as a historical work in language and its origins. Geology, a parent of archaeology, was one of the major pursuits of Novalis's scientific career; during the last four years of his life he practiced it professionally. A student of Abraham Gottlob Werner, a preeminent geologist who blazed his own trail in the field, Novalis was inspired by and respected his mentor's work yet was sceptical of his emphasis on outward signs and symptoms of mineral remains which excluded an understanding of their historical character. He criticized Werner's synchronic or atemporal, that is, merely theoretical analysis of data which failed to elicit the significance of their diachronic or temporal constitution (Haslinger 1981, 87). "Both mineralogists and organologists seem to have taken very little notice of the development of categories as such—of the serial degree of increase [Graderhöhungsreihe ] in columns" (Novalis 1960, 3: 392, no. 661). Novalis, for his part, demonstrates in metaphors of geographical strata—mines, an underground library—that knowing both draws on the fixed moment in the past (as tradition) and recasts it in the present. In other words, all knowledge comes into being at the intersection of cultural and scientific heritage and theoretical and empirical evidence.

Layers of geological time constitute a form of encyclopedic knowledge. The old miner explains his passion for mineralogy as a passion for hidden origins. Just as Heinrich always pursues words that could represent his dreams, so did the miner always wish as a boy that the brilliant stones he gathered could speak so as to reveal

their mysterious origins (ibid., 1: 239–240). "You miners are almost astrologers in reverse," says Hohenzollern, "they study the powers and effects of the constellations and you investigate the powers of rocks and mountains and the manifold effects of the strata of earth and rock. To them the sky is the book of the future, whereas to you the earth reveals monuments of the primeval world" (ibid., 1: 260). As a natural science that is also archaeological, geology, in a sense, allegorizes the study of language as a form of natural history. In a fascinating study on the discovery of geological time, which echoes Novalis's geological insights, Stephen Jay Gould, a renowned contemporary geologist and paleontologist, recounts how two British geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell were aided in their discoveries both by the organizing principles of time and cultural tradition and by their superior scientific knowledge of rocks. Gould shows how the understanding of time is compressed in metaphor as well as in geological layers.

The interplay of internal and external sources—of theory informed by metaphor and observation constrained by theory—marks any major movement in science. We can grasp the discovery of deep time when we recognize the metaphors underlying several centuries of debate as a common heritage of all people who have ever struggled with such basic riddles as direction and immanence. (1987, 8)

Memory is not the ontological ground of knowing as in Hegel. In fact, memory and its discipline, history, are fragments—"the motley and living creation draws its nourishment from the ruins of past ages" (Novalis 1960, 1: 327). Memories and dreams (as the topos of knowing outside time and space) maintain the Romantic tension between epistemological certainty and metaphysical anxiety. Like the Provençal manuscript, which constitutes the mirror image of the larger text, Heinrich von Ofterdingen excludes that moment where total representation is possible, in other words, where the irreducible gap between representation and concept is closed. The moment of this closure is infinitely postponed. In "The Library of Babel" Borges writes that humanity has always lived with the desire to discover "the origin of the Library and of time." This task is an endless task of seeking the direct and immediate representation of being and truth. "If the language of philosophers is not sufficient" for this end, "the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and

grammars." The elusive language of truth is pursued by "official searchers, inquisitors, " who endlessly search all corners of the earth and "always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words" (1964, 55). The search is never called off. Like Scheherazade's tales in The Arabian Nights, the endless search for narratives in the library points to the human desire for life and survival. Human understanding and life depend on a perpetual postponement of closure. In the heart of this allegory of the cave or library lies the art of remembering the collective tales of "one thousand and one nights."